Category: WonderfulWolf Crafts

‘Ocean’ is emblazoned with many sea treasures; sea glass, sea shells, sea pottery and driftwood mostly collected from the shores of a South Queensferry beach. He is hand sculpted from air drying clay and then carefully painted in blue hues to reflect the ocean itself.

Ocean is designed to be hung on the wall and therefore has a simple hole for hanging (e.g place on to a picture hook or nail). He will arrive nestled in tissue paper and securely tied down within a tear strip postal box – all the packaging is recyclable.

‘Sahara’ reflects the purity and elegance of a natural skull. After being hand sculpted from clay I painted minimal detail and use natural tones to accentuate her curves and shape.

Sahara’s ‘horns’ are actually a pair of ‘Baileyi’ Airplants. Here are my simple recommendations on how to keep them happy and healthy;
– Mist the plants once or twice a week with water, ensuring they have dried off within 4 hours or your plants may begin to rot.
– Place the skull in a bright room, but out of direct sunlight as the plant may get too dry and begin to brown.
I include a care sheet specific to the variety of airplant with each skull for future reference.

Sahara is designed to be hung on the wall and therefore has a simple hole for hanging (e.g. place on to a picture hook or nail). She will arrive nestled in tissue paper and securely tied down within a tear strip postal box – all the packaging is recyclable.

I have taken inspiration from the warmth of the setting Sun to create this piece called ‘Sol’. He is hand sculpted from air drying clay and is adorned with a beautiful, unusual piece of sea glass picked from the shores of a South Queensferry beach.

Sol’s ‘horns’ are actually a pair of ‘Butzii’ Airplants. Here are my simple recommendations on how to keep them happy and healthy;
– Mist the plants once or twice a week with water, ensuring they have dried off within 4 hours or your plants may begin to rot.
– Place the skull in a bright room, but out of direct sunlight as the plant may get too dry and begin to brown.
I include a care sheet specific to the variety of airplant ‘horns’ with each skull for your future reference.

Sol is designed to be hung on the wall and therefore has a simple hole for hanging (e.g place on to a picture hook or nail). He will arrive nestled in tissue paper and securely tied down within a tear strip postal box – all the packaging is recyclable.

So unfortunately, as of yet, I haven’t sold any constellation necklaces! But I’m not sure why. I feel the price is fair, I can’t reduce it any further as a lot of time goes in to creating each piece. And I think they’re attractive, I mean I know they’re not going to be to everyone’s taste but they’re bound to appeal to someone. So the only thing that I could think to change was the product shots.

Originallly I had them on a 3D paper cut, galaxy background. To be fair it maybe looked cool full size, but actually when reduced to a thumb nail it didn’t show up the necklaces that well: it was dark on dark, stars on stars. Totally different now! Check out my Etsy shop for the full set of new pictures, I now have 5 pictures for each necklace, and let me know what you think!

I went for a light background to really make the black pop, along with some crystals and glitter to help convey a galactic feel. For admittedly not having a great eye for photography I’m pretty chuffed with how they turned out maybe just because they’ve freshened up my shop. But I’m not going to pretend it was quick or easy; changing props, settings, angles, lighting and so on I ended up taking well over 200 shots, then having to edit those the whole thing took a good few hours to result in 12 usable pictures. That isn’t a moan but just a peak at the ‘behind the scenes’ work that goes in to creating hand-made products for sale online. It’s something I’d never thought about before, had you?

So I’m super excited to finally be able introduce my ‘Tillandsia Skulls’! What do yous think? Have a look through them and tell me what one’s your fave!

I’ve been working hard on them for the past few weeks figuring out things like scale and paint finishes, refining the sculpting process and finding out what looks cool as inserts. (Sea glass and gemstones are a yes!)

They’re hand sculpted from clay, dried, painted and then paired with their Tillandsia (airplant) horns. Each skull ends up being completely unique due to the nature of their creation – I just can’t sculpt the exact same shape each time! I can get close, but they’re not clones. The skulls come with a hole in the back of them allowing them to be hung on your wall.

Tillandsias are usually pretty hardy; they enjoy a bright room but not direct sunlight and require a light misting every week or so with plain water. I’d advise removing them from your wall to do this in case you end up with water spots on your wallpaper or paint. There’s no need to worry about the paint on the skull though, as it’s been varnished and therefore mist proof!

I’ve not yet listed any on my Etsy shop as I’m reserving their debut for my craft-show appearance on the 12th and 13th this month. It’s in Livingston Shopping center so if you’re around be sure to come say hi! I’ll also have my plantosaurs and tote bags with me. (Also stay tuned for a peek at what my stall will hopefully look like on the day.)

So I’m trying to take my craft selling a little more seriously. I worked hard to take some ‘good looking’ product shots and opened up my Etsy shop. Hooray!

The next step was to sort out was my website. I bought my domain name years ago but never got round to doing anything with it, the idea of building my own website seemed too scary so I procrastinated. Until last week and got stuck in to it.

Funnily enough it was enjoyable in a way, kind of satisfying. And whilst not the slickest of websites, I suppose it does the job. So please have a look, (click on the photo below) and let me know what you think as sometimes with being the ‘creator’ it means you’re too close to see it’s faults.

So today I launched some tote bags on Etsy! They are all hand-printed by my fair hands, on a cotton bag made from 100% recycled cotton. As they are hand-printed each bag is totally unique – there might be some extra paint, there might be a squint print, some might be some slightly lighter in colour but I think this all adds to their charm! They are safe to wash, but in order to keep the design looking it’s best I’d recommend either spot cleaning them or hand washing them.

The inspiration for all these bags came from plants that I’m growing in my garden this year.

The first bag is printed with super cute strawberries. My strawberry plants are now actually 3 years old! Sadly though this means that I’ll probably have to get some new plants next year, as they don’t produce as many berries after 3 or 4 years. There are 20 strawberries printed on this bag – 10 on the front, 10 on the back.

I’ve grown carrots once before, and they turned out to be tiny little things but rather sweet and tasty. I know you’ve got to have quite sandy or unlumpy soil to make it easier for them to grow, so fingers crossed they’ll be better this time round. There are 10 carrots printed on the bag – 10 on the front, 10 on the back.

I’ve never grown radish before. I also don’t even particularly like radish, but I’m hoping that if they do grow okay I can finely slice them or pickle them for salads. I grew potatoes and peas last year, but supposedly you’re not meant to grow potatoes in the same place two years in a row hence the change to different root vegetables this year. This bag has 20 radish printed on it – 10 on the front, 10 on the back.

So which bag is your favourite? These totes are great for shoving in your pocket or hand bag meaning you’ve always got a plastic bag alternative handy. Please make sure to have a look at my Etsy shop and let me know what you think about the product shots!

So for some reason I took a hankering to do some lino printing at the weekend, having never touched my tools in probably years. (Ever have one of those moods that appear by random for something random? Weird ae.) I also had some spare canvas bags kicking around and therefore the perfect combo for a ‘Monday Make’ was born. A radish printed bag!

The following admission shouldn’t make me a terrible person, I certainly know die hard lino fans will be spitting out their coffee and reeling in horror but… I know I said lino printing, I actually cheat and use that vinyl lino as I find it way easier to carve as it’s softer and smoother.

I started by drawing out a simplified sketch of a radish. It was important for me to keep it simple as I was firstly out of practice and didn’t fancy trying to carve anything too complex and secondly I was going to print it as a repeating pattern and didn’t want the over-all effect to look too busy.

I then traced the design in pencil on to some layout paper and did the whole pencil transfer thing by scribbling all over the back. As the vinyl is grey, the pencil marks can be pretty hard to see so I advise going over them in pen.

Then it was time for the fun part, the carving! There’s probably I proper technique to doing it, but I start by craving the outline and then working from there to remove all the excess. Top tip – just take your time, remember you can always remove but never put back!

The other fun part (can there be two fun parts?) is testing out the stamp for the first time. I chose to cut my radish in half so I could have the leaves green and the radish red. I applied the paint by brush (usually it’s by roller, sorry lino printers. Better go make yourself another coffee again and put on a new t-shirt.) and pressed it on to the paper. Obviously on bigger stamping blocks using a roller would give a smooth, even coverage but for little radishes I think brushes are just fine! I like the look of the brush strokes, I think it gives it a little more of a rustic charm no?

As I was happy with the way the stamp printed, it was time to put radish on to canvas. I added a little more paint to one side of the radish after it was printed to help achieve a rounded, shaded look as I felt it looked a little flat.

Press, print, repeat and soon you’ll have a lovely canvas bag covered in radishes. The fabric paint I used needs to be ironed for 5 minutes before it’s ‘fixed’ on to the fabric so make sure you read the instructions of yours. Nobody wants their radishes running in the rain!

Has anyone ever printed before? I think it’s quite a satisfying, easy craft to do and get in to – it’s a little addictive to be honest as I’ve already made a strawberry and carrot bag too!

So I recently purchased a new phone but the shop didn’t sell cases for them (seems a bit backwards right?…) and because I hate a scratched screen I decided to make a case for it myself. I mean sure, there are ones for it online but they’re just so darn ugly!

I went with felt as my material of choice; it’s easy to sew, it’s colourful and it’s soft but protective.

I started out by pinning my phone in to the felt to create a pouch. I decided to do it this way, instead of measuring, to ensure it was going to be snug enough for it. I then removed my phone, drew a straight line along the pins and started sewing – it was handy to have the lines there as it meant I sewed a bit straighter than by eye. I chose to use a back stitch as it’s simple but secure and gives a neat finish.
(Top tip – reduced the amount of sewing you need to do by using a fold over of felt rather than two separate pieces.)

After sewing my pouch I trimmed off the excess felt from the edges and turned it inside out. Fortunately the phone still fitted and looked as snug as a bug in a rug!

It was now time for the fun part – decorating! Of course you could go for anything you wanted as there’s endless colours of felt, but I chose to go with Totoro since he’s an easy pattern to deconstruct in to pieces.

Once all the pieces were cut out I used felt glue to stick it all together. As you can see I added a little embroidery detail to Totoro’s leaf for extra interest. The fabric glue I have isn’t great; it’s more wet than tacky so can take ages to get things stuck together, especially thick felt. Therefore I try to press the pieces together under something heavy whilst they dry to make sure it all sticks, this time the pocket was small enough to be squashed in my flower press and it did the trick!

(Top Tip – Place a piece of paper in the pocket to prevent glue soaking through and sticking the pocket sides together.)

I gave it a good hour or so drying time in the press and ta-da one perfectly sized phone case, but Totoro was missing one final detail… Did you spot what it was, his whiskers!

This was a pretty simple and quick project, but also cheap! The felt squares were from Hobbycraft at 50p each, so in a way you are in control of how much or how little you need to spend, for my design I used 5 colours which totals to £2.50. I’m super happy with the results! Does anyone else hate how boring phone cases can be if you’ve not got an Iphone?